In the medieval period of Crusader Kings 3, there are a great many things to worry about. The succession of your realm, your unruly neighbours, great holy wars. But one you simply cannot control, and the one that is potentially the deadliest, are plagues. No planning can stop stop a bout of Typhus can killing you and everyone around you.
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Plagues are an invisible threat, one you can’t fully stop, and one that is mostly unpredictable. They can destroy the stability of your realm, losing you plenty of tax income and cutting through your carefully established vassals. Here’s exactly how Plagues work, and the best ways you can minimise their impact.
How Do Plagues Work?
The first thing to understand about plagues is that they are, mostly, random. There’s no way of wiping out plagues entirely from appearing, nor can you strictly determine how long they’ll stay around either. Intensity is determined at the point that plague comes into existence, too. An apocalyptic plague will always be apocalyptic, but the same is true of a minor plague as well.
What you can have an effect on is how much a plague spreads, though that’s about it. Beyond that, it’s making sure you can survive. Every plague carries with it a specific disease, which is just about always catastrophic if a characters gets infected. Thankfully, plagues are not actually spread by people, but locations. As such, unless your character physically travels somewhere with the plague, they won’t get infected by someone in their own court.
There are exceptions to this, though they are mainly triggered by other events.
Plagues spread through individual baronies, though where they originally spawn is somewhat random, though a higher Development level will have both a higher chance of spawning a plague, as well as getting infected by default.
What Affects A Plague Spreading?
Like real-life diseases, after a plague appears, priority number one should be containing it, and making sure it can’t spread into the rest of your realm. There are a few ways that you can achieve this, but let’s first look at how the plague spreads naturally.
Once a plague appears in a given barony, it has the chance to both infect people in that barony, and spread beyond it. This is determined in part by your Disease Resistance. The spread is not impacted by the actual infected people moving, but the actions of the plague itself.
With a high Disease Resistance, you have two benefits – a lower number of infections in the respective barony, and a lower chance of the barony becoming infected in the first place. Plagues spread to baronies adjacent to each other, and can’t normally jump over them. This means if a plague begins multiple baronies away from your capital, it’s unlikely to even reach you if you have a high Disease Resistance in the baronies in between.
Water is another major help for plagues. Baronies situated by bodies of water, rivers especially, will have a much higher chance of spreading to adjacent baronies. There’s no specific way to counter this other than constructing buildings such as Hospices in those baronies.
Once a barony is infected though, that Disease Resistance is still relevant, as it will cut down on the overall number of people infected in the barony. It’s impossible to stop plagues appearing entirely, especially as your Development increases, though you can work hard to mitigate them.
How To Handle Plagues
So now that you know how plagues work naturally, you can work on the actions you, as a player and ruler, can do to stop them spreading throughout your realm. There are two major methods to achieve this:
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Building Disease Resisting Buildings
Certain buildings, such as Hospices, can be built that grant Disease Resistance to the barony in which it is built.
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Personal Physician Tasks
When in the Plagues menu, you can set your Personal Physician to a multitude of tasks. These require additional Gold each month, but can provide you with Disease Resistance for your whole realm, additional lifestyle experience, or more piety respectively.
Constructing Disease Resistance buildings is a long-term goal, and it’s worth having one in most baronies to reduce the spread and infection rate as much as possible. It’s is the safest method, but also the most expensive. With the time it takes to build them, you can’t just suddenly prop them up when a plague comes knocking.
In that sense, it is just about always worth it to have your Personal Physician assigned to Control Plagues. For just an extra 0.30 Gold each month, you get a massive boost to your entire realm’s Disease Resistance.
The degree to which your Physician can improve your Disease Resistance scales off their aptitude. Never skimp out on a Personal Physician, because they will save the lives of you and your subjects.
Recovering From A Plague
After a plague hits your realm, it is important to keep track of where exactly it was present. Any county that was infected with a plague will have had its Development decreased, typically quite dramatically. A modifier will usually remain for a few years afterwards as well, though this may be countered if your Personal Physician managed to catch the plague early.
In this case, it is worth sending your Marshal to the area to increase Control, helping you regain those cost taxes sooner. Allowing your Steward to improve the Development there as well is a good cause as even if it doesn’t strictly improve it, it should at least help mitigate the negative impact of the plague.
Plagues are a common scourge, but they are devastating. The best medicine against them is adequate preparation. Don’t forgo building Hospices as they will save the lives of your subjects. And if a plague does ever find its way to your capital, don’t be afraid to take the Isolate Capital decision. It may make your subjects dislike you for a while, but it’s better than your whole court winding up dead.
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